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Friday, December 3, 2010

Loh bak (Sausage Pork Roll) is another famous Penang Nyonya food. It is also one of the Penang well known hawker delights easily available at many Penang street stalls or night markets sold as finger food. Usually they are sold in a combo platter of loh bak which includes, prawn fritters, fried bean curd (taukua) , five spice hard boiled eggs, century eggs, and slices of cucumber.

Recalling my school days, I used to eat Loh Bak as supper after late night shopping with friends at night markets. We used to order a combo plate and sit down to share this little snack before heading home. To many Penang families, it can also be served as an entree in a multi-course meal especially during festive celebrations or sometimes even wedding dinners.

I'd been thinking of making this for quite a while now; I had even bought the bean curd sheets but just had not got the right time to make it. With Auntie Lan , our Nyonya expert around, how could we not ask her to make this Nyonya dish while she's still with us? J So, again let me feature my guest chef showing off her Nyonya cooking skills.
However, we were unable to come out with the same loh bak taste as back home. This was because I couldn't find one of the main ingredients that's called Sengkuang in Malay or "bangkuang" in Hokkien which was a kind of sweet root vegetable. When I wrote this post, I tried to Google for English name; it gave me a Spanish word Jicama and Yam bean. I was surprised to read that some refers to it as turnip. I guess for our next trial we can either use water chestnuts or opt to use turnip as replacement.

My auntie said you can also make this into vegetarian version by replacing the meat with Yam. Vegetarian Loh Bak （斋卤肉）which has another name "Huang Jiang" in Teochew is one of the many vegetarian dishes prepared by her during the 1st day of Chinese New year. This day is also regarded as vegetarian day and following the Chinese customs we are to start off with vegetarian meals.

5 comments:

tut tut no veggie version Yin, only non veg hahaha. bean skin is a problem. but we get canned water chestnuts here. otherwise i would like to try the pork mince filling and roll it up in my recipe dough. thank you.